Cancer treatment: it's not just about the postcodes

In the Scottish Parliament, Labour leader Johann Lamont has raised the case of a cancer patient who is “considering moving to England to get free access to drugs she cannot be prescribed on the NHS in Scotland.” Lamont is critical of money being used to pay for paracetamol while this drug is not prescribed.

Cetuximab is a drug prescribed in certain cases of advanced cancer, principally colo-rectal or head and neck cancer; in both circumstances it’s used for a relatively short period in combination with other therapies. It’s approved for use in Scotland and England and Wales on similar terms, but the terms are highly specific. Three issues are worth noting. One is that while the treatment does lead to an improvement in life expectancy, the improvement is very small – two to four months, assuming best supportive care. The second is that the drug is dangerous: “Cetuximab has a non-trivial safety profile and data are compatible with an increased risk of death in patients administered cetuximab as add-on to chemotherapy.” (Scottish Medicines Consortium) The third issue, as often happens, is that the drug is also very costly – the Health Technology Assessment suggests that the manufacturers have underestimated both the duration of treatment and the cost of supportive care.

It’s not possible to tell what the basis is for the decision about the particular patient identified in the Scotsman, and I’m not going to try. It’s not difficult to understand, however, that decisions about prescription have to be made in a specific context, for a specific person, and that different decision-making bodies may reasonably arrive at different conclusions.

Paracetamol, by contrast, is a largely beneficial drug, prescribed in well over two million cases in Scotland every year. The idea that Scotland should stop prescribing it in order to facilitate paying for expensive drugs with very limited benefits doesn’t look like sound policy.